Travels with my Donkey

unpacked, Shinto was unsaddled, and without conviction I led him to the foot of the hill.
    At the first tight turn he lost his footing and loosened a small avalanche of unburdened sin; I made to turn back, then realised the practical impossibility of doing so. Round and up and round and up: more than once he dug his hoofs in ominously, but each time a gentle tug on the rope somehow got him moving. The turns tightened as we climbed, and then, after a rather technical dressage around two sheep-sized lumps of quartz, we were at the summit.
    All around lay the windswept, panoramic proof that here was the stork's nest atop the camino's steeple. To our right, the messy peaks of Galicia; and to our left, down through the heather and then the pines, the misty memories of our symbolic death, the ochred foreshore of that sea of leather, the meseta alta. A rain-tossed salad when I'd started out across it, now it lay brown and dry as a day-old burger.
    Shinto seemed oddly relaxed, but I was unsettled by the wind and the disorientating vastness of the prospect, and placed a steadying hand on the wooden pole. Its bottom 7 feet or so were fulsomely decorated with a confounding assortment of apparently significant objects: a foot-long blonde plait, a cycle clip, an enamel saucepan. Up here the stones had given way to more obscure embodiments of contrition, weathered offerings piled about my feet in ephemeral judgement of the conflicting people who did what I was doing, and the conflicting reasons they did it for. A sock, a bra, a jockstrap. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Two postcards of the Virgin; a toy gun and a full pack of Rothmans; boots and shoes and heather. All stacked up around the bottom of the cross's wooden trunk, like someone's crap Christmas.
    What was the story behind that bloodstained tea towel? Or that die-cast Peugeot 205? And what of the three humble stones that I now laid carefully to rest at the summit? Trying to think big thoughts I made to round the pole and descend, but Shinto wouldn't budge. There he stood, gazing importantly at the great prairie we had conquered, ears forward, mane aflutter, head held proud, as if imagining himself a stag and this a whisky label. Unsaddled and at one with creation: this was all as Our Mister intended, though what happened next probably wasn't.
    I didn't see the tail go up until it was too late. A tactful yard or so away from competing personal offerings, exhibiting a sense of place and history of which I had not been previously aware, Shinto laid down two dozen pebbles of his own. Petronella was so touched when I told her, she cried again, though others she told later were outraged. I didn't care: in my eyes this was as affectingly spiritual an experience as any I had enjoyed to date. No man can ever have felt more proud of a donkey as I did watching Shinto crap atop the Cruz de Ferro. It was, indeed, his pilgrimage too.
    Petronella walked with us for the rest of the day. It was by no means all downhill from hereon, but that afternoon it felt like it. Shinto almost leant into the corners as the gradient picked up, and we fairly barrelled into the crippled remains of Manjarín. A grim village with only one occupied house, but an essential stop for a certain type of pilgrim. We saw the queue before we saw the house: eleven sombre walkers seated in auspicious silence beneath an arthritic wooden crucifix.
    What is it about the charitable eccentric that compels him to wear a stained beanie hat covered in badges? As soon as I saw Tomás I thought of Mad Eli picking coins off the floor of his headless-teddy grotto in my parents' home town of Bath. Tomás had chosen to pair his own example of the genre with a scrappy white beard and an ostentatiously soiled T-shirt emblazoned with the red cross of Santiago. 'He is a real Templario,' said a Dutch girl I met later, constructing the more mysterious half of a two-part pen portrait, 'but, ah, always with water coming out of his mouth when he talks.'
    If Tomás was an endearingly medieval mess then so was his private refugio, holes in the roof sheathed with brick-weighted plastic bags, the walls within draped in a wild chaos of old towels and blankets. Templario, I'd vaguely concluded, was probably something to do with pilgrim protectors of yore the Knights Templar, but this edifice seemed less the castle of the self-styled keeper of their flame than a bypass protestors' hut after the first assault by police bulldozers. I left